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Evaluate your impact

How to go about evaluating your public engagement support programme.

Evaluating your work is key to reflecting on what is working well and where improvements can be made, as well as assessing the impact of your work. The key steps to any evaluation plan, whether you are evaluating a public engagement activity, a culture change project, or a long term support programme, are the same.

Here our focus is how you can use evaluation to measure the impact of your work to support engagement effectively. We have created a downloadable guide which takes you through the process step by step. Download our guide to evaluating your support for public engagement.

In the guide we explore:

How to differentiate between outputs, outcomes and impact as these provide helpful ways to define the different ways in which your work can contribute to change, over time. We provide examples of each.

We explain how you might frame the types of impact that arise from a support programme, offering three categories of impact (conceptual, capacity building and instrumental impacts).

We explain how you can set useful objectives for your support programme, and put in place plans to evaluate your success in achieving them.

We explore the kinds of evidence you can gather as part of that evaluation.

The NCCPE can offer various kinds of support in this area:

We can provide you with a benchmarking survey to review the current state of support at your institution.